How censorship and internet access works in China

Without Google, No facebook, The internet in China can be a lot worse than that. Doubt it? Well, know that you can be arrested for signing an Online petition!

If you have been to the internet for some time then you already know that the internet in China is not a very nice thing. Not because of the upload speed of YouTube videos, but because you can not access YouTube there! That still be the 15th country in a world ranking of connection speed in mobile devices and 22nd in fixed connection speed (Brazil is in 76th and 72nd places, respectively), but having the government spying on everything you do and saying What you can and what you can not access?

The control of the Internet there is so great that the monitoring system of the Chinese government, the most advanced in the world, by the way, is called the Great Firewall of China, playing with the Great Wall.

Just to give you an idea, the international NGO, Journalists Without Borders, which measures freedom of the press in countries around the world and classifies them as the most libertarian to the most oppressive, puts China in position 176 of 180. According to this ranking, the country Can only be more “free” than Syria, Turkmenistan, Eritrea and North Korea (Brazil is 103rd). The idea here is not to go into details of how the ranking measures whether journalists in the country are free or not, but the freedom of the internet is one of the basic criteria of evaluation, so the ranking is very suggestive for you to have a sense of How the Chinese people have access to the Network.

The idea of the post is to try to understand what happens there and have a notion of how complicated it is to access Facebook or send a tweet directly from the country, incidentally, can tutor in China ??

But before starting the discussion we must avoid sectarian comments that will try to reduce it to the poor struggle of communism vs. capitalism. Yes, China has a communist regime and a strong repression of individual freedoms on this account, as well as Eritrea and Syria, both capitalists. That is, it does not make much difference here.

Access to information and censorship in general in the country

This is not the focus of the article, but it is important that we highlight how censorship as a whole works to understand how internet control works.

On account of his regime, China owns a one-armed government called Xinhua News Agency which functions as an official government news agency. Anything more sensitive – such as the recent conflict with North Korea – should follow the guidelines passed by the agency. In fact, most “strained” news is made directly by this news agency and other vehicles will only reproduce them. There are more than 30,000 censors working at the Xinhua News Agency to ensure that everything went as planned.

China is still one of the largest countries in territorial extension and has almost 1.5 billion people (the largest population on the planet). China still has television as the main information vehicle for the masses, especially since around 50% of its inhabitants still do not have Internet access. And as “unofficial” TV networks do not exist there, people often do not even know they are having a partial view of the event, taking the view offered by official agencies as the only truth.